The love that saved me: In a deeply emotional interview, Sgt Blackman reveals the horror of being jailed after serving his country, the magical moment he was freed - and his boundless gratitude for the wife who never gave up hope

Sgt Alexander Blackman was finally released from prison at the end of April

He had been conviction of murder for shooting a Taliban fanatic in Afghanistan

Sergeant Alexander Blackman had been behind bars for 1,134 days when he learned that his controversial murder conviction for killing a Taliban fanatic on the battlefield stood a chance of being quashed.

The independent Criminal Cases Review Commission had accepted new psychiatric evidence that the Royal Marine — a man of ‘impeccable moral courage’ until he was ‘dismissed with disgrace’ at a court martial in 2013 — was suffering combat stress when he snapped and shot a mortally wounded insurgent in Afghanistan, and was referring his case for a fresh appeal.

It was a tremendous victory not only for common sense but for his ‘wife in a million’, Claire, who had fought tooth and nail to clear her husband’s name, as well as for the Daily Mail readers who so generously gave £810,000 to the Marine’s legal fund.

Devoted: Alex Blackman with his wife Claire

Al was reading in his cell at HMP Erlestoke Prison in Wiltshire when a fellow inmate burst in with the news. He says: ‘Lots of people, especially the lads in prison, had been saying for months, “Have you heard anything?” Some of them had put into the campaign fund. When you’ve got someone who’s earning £15 a week sending a fiver to help fight to get you out of prison it’s . . .’

Such is his gratitude, words elude him. It is one of the few times during this astonishingly candid interview that 42-year-old Al struggles to contain tears. He takes a deep breath.

‘This guy came running into my cell telling me to bang on the TV. It was on the news. The CCRC had decided they were sending my case back to the Appeal Court. They receive thousands of cases and, of those, less than 5 per cent are sent back. You realise you’ve come over a hell of a hurdle and you think, “There’s a chance here.”

‘I spoke to Claire on the phone. We said, “Let’s not get too excited. It’s great news but, as things stand, I’ve still got five years of my minimum sentence to do.

‘Enjoy it for today but let’s not get carried away.” ’

Al and Claire are, as they say, ‘practical rather than emotional’ types. When Claire visited him in prison, which she did every week, more often than not, they talked about the stuff of everyday life — such as rugby scores.

‘There were plenty of times we didn’t talk about the case at all,’ she says. ‘We were all talked out.

‘Often, we’d just sit there with an ice cream or hot chocolate enjoying spending time with each other, trying to be as normal as we could.

‘Even knowing, OK, you’ve got eight years [Al’s initial minimum ten-year sentence had been reduced to eight at an earlier appeal], you think: “We’ve got to get on with it. Let’s break this down into bite-size chunks. We’ve done three years. We can do this.”’

Claire and her husband of eight years were reunited after he was freed from jail

Claire, 45, says her role was to support her husband. She admits: ‘There were times when it was tough. The hardest thing probably has been the family occasions — the get-togethers and notable birthdays.

‘There’s nothing worse than turning up to those when everyone else is there together but there’s only one half of you there and it’s not ever going to be the same as if he was with you like he should be.’

Now Claire is in tears. Over the past four years, she has had to be so very strong. Just ten days ago, Al was freed on licence from prison: finally, she can relax.

They married in a church in the foothills of the Mendips in December 2009 in ‘a ‘flurry of snow, confetti and blue skies’, and Claire has only ever known Al to be a generous-hearted, thoughtful man.

‘I remember shortly after we met, in a bar, I’d been to my godmother’s funeral. Al was on leave at his mum and dad’s in Brighton, and rang to see how I was.

‘I said, “I’m OK but I could do with a hug.” When I got home there was a knock on the door. He’d got on his motorbike and come all that way to deliver me a hug.’

Today, she says, they’re like ‘two legs of the same pair of trousers’. Just the two of them has always been enough. Claire has never felt the need to have children.

‘I’ve never had that ticking biological clock,’ she says. ‘If Al had really wanted children, no question we’d have done it, but I think we enjoyed each other’s company too much.

‘I’m just so glad now that we didn’t have children. Imagine having to have put them through the past four years.’

Claire was in a shop in Somerset when a ‘distraught’ Al phoned her from custody in Colchester military jail, a year after the atrociously hellish tour he spoke about with such compelling honesty in Saturday’s Mail.

‘The only person whose opinion I’ve really cared about is hers. I was thinking: “What will she think of me? What will it do to our relationship?”

‘I said: “This isn’t what you signed up for when we got married, so if it’s too much and you want to part company I’ll fully understand.” ’ He turns to her. ‘It’s not what you ...’

Brave marine Sgt Blackman in 2001

Claire takes his hand: ‘And miss all of this?’

He smiles. ‘Well, it’s not something you expected you were going to have to go through when you stood there on your wedding day.’ She leans into this huge bear of a man. ‘I know what you’re saying,’ she says. ‘Other people have said it. But that conversation moved me to tears because I’d never heard you that upset.

‘I remember exactly what I said: “Don’t ever, ever, say or think that again, because we’re in this together and everything will be fine.” And it is, isn’t it?’

Neither of them, though, anticipated the three-and-half-year battle for justice that lay ahead.

‘When they said “Guilty” at the court martial, it’s like someone’s dropped an anvil on top of you.

‘The defence team had told us they felt we were in a good position,’ says Al. ‘Right through the court process, they told us they felt it was going well. They led us to believe all this would go away.’

Al, at this time, was known to the public only as Marine A to protect his identity. In court, he stood with two young marines from his troop partitioned off by a screen.

They too faced charges of murder for what had taken place that fateful day in September 2011 in what has been described as ‘the most dangerous square mile on Earth’.

‘You think, “Did I miss something? Did I miss a not? Did he say Not Guilty?” I didn’t think he did: I think he just said “Guilty’.

‘Then they went straight to the verdicts for the other two. They were acquitted. There was a massive sense of relief that I hadn’t wrecked their lives.’

Al was taken to the back of the court to change from his dress uniform into his combats.

‘Claire came in. I was a bit of a wreck. You’ve just been found guilty of murder. You know that comes with a life sentence.’

He was transported in a caged minibus to Colchester Military Prison to await sentencing the following month.

‘One of the guards jumped in the back with him, so he wouldn’t have to roll around in the van worrying on his own,’ says Claire. ‘There have been so many people who have been so kind. To know he’d done that . . .’

She is crying now. ‘I’m just so grateful to that guy because everything was out of my hands at that point.’

At Colchester, Al was placed on suicide watch. ‘I was depressed,’ he says, ‘so I was sleeping in an observation cell, with a big mirror so they could see what I was doing. I had to sleep on my back with my arms above the blanket.

‘When you’re waiting for sentence, you don’t know what you’re going to get. Is it going to be bad or is it going to be horrific? You don’t know where to go at that point.’

On December 6, 2013, Al was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of ten years. He was also dismissed with disgrace.

‘That was the worse bit for me — the dismissal with disgrace,’ says Claire. ‘It sounds ridiculous to say your husband’s got a life sentence and the hardest part to hear is “disgrace”. But for such an amazing career . . .’ She bites her lip.

Al doesn’t remember much about that moment. ‘My mind was completely gone. I was focusing on the far distance, thinking, “Oh my God, it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” ’

As dictated by Army protocol, he saluted the board. [A court martial has a board, not a jury.] The seven members saluted him back.

‘We didn’t know the board are not meant to do that until a senior officer told me they all insisted they wanted to,’ says Claire. ‘For me, that was the moment I thought, “This is not right”.

‘There had been so many things that didn’t add up. It wasn’t that I didn’t ask questions — I did. I’ve watched the telly and sometimes there will be an argument for manslaughter running alongside the murder charge.

‘I asked our legal team, “Why are we not doing that?” They told me the prosecution decided upon the charges and they wanted to go all out for murder.

‘That was the answer I was given, and I trusted them.

‘After Al was sentenced, I didn’t know where to go, but I was determined I wasn’t going to let them do this to him.’

In truth, Claire’s determination to seek justice for her husband was never a co-ordinated campaign.

‘It was more a continuous series of activities that rumbled along,’ she says. ‘A gentleman we’d never met set up an e-petition for Al’s case to be debated in Parliament. He did it out of frustration because he didn’t know what else to do.’

Claire, 45, says her role was to support her husband

An ex-Marine, John Davies — again someone Al and Claire did not previously know — set up a Facebook page.

‘He was furious with what had happened to Al. Without him we wouldn’t have got 100,000 names on the petition,’ says Claire.

‘But we still had to have an MP to host it. I wrote to several MPs I thought might do it because they had a military background. Everything I’ve done has been a little bit of a stab in the dark.

‘Richard Drax MP responded. He went up to Lincoln [the Category B civilian prison Al had been moved to] to see Al. That’s a big ask to go all the way up there.

‘He rang me on the way home and said: “Something is really wrong here.” It was such a relief to hear somebody else who was a genuinely independent voice saying what I’d been telling myself for so long.’

The campaign began to gather momentum, particularly once best-selling author and former RAF pilot Frederick Forsyth wrote about it in his newspaper column.

‘Out of courtesy, I wrote to him via his publisher to thank him for his support. He quickly got back in touch to say, “Can we meet?” That was a critical point.

‘He bought the transcripts of the court martial and asked a friend of his, Jonathan Goldberg QC, to look through them to see if anything stood out as missed or wrong. He didn’t even tell me he was doing it. He just copied me into emails.

‘Jonathan felt we did have grounds for a fresh appeal but decided we needed a public voice. So Freddie approached the Daily Mail — he knew the Mail was the campaigning newspaper.’

A Mail investigation revealed the existence of a secret Royal Navy inquiry, codenamed Telemeter, into the circumstances surrounding the Blackman shooting. It had been commissioned months after he had been convicted.

Sources led the investigative team to understand the final report was critical of a number of factors and individuals. They also learned that one of the Royal Marines’ most highly regarded officers, Colonel Oliver Lee, had resigned his commission as a result of what he saw as the unjust way in which Al had been treated.

An analysis by Mr Goldberg and his team also demonstrated the flaws in the original court martial: the fact that an alternative verdict of manslaughter was not offered, nor, inexplicably, was Al examined by a psychiatrist until after his conviction.

Upon these foundations the new campaign for justice was built. An appeal to fund it was launched and Mail readers responded with overwhelming generosity.

‘You’d never think that so many people who don’t know you from Adam could care enough to do anything, let alone put their hands in their pocket for you at a time in this country where money is tight for a lot of people,’ says Al.

On December 6, 2013, Al was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of ten years. He was also dismissed with disgrace

He and Claire are clearly deeply moved by the public response.

‘That support helped so much more than I ever anticipated,’ says Claire. ‘It made me feel like I wasn’t in this alone. It felt like the whole country and most of the world were behind me.’ We were.

On March 15, Al’s conviction for murder was substituted by manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility after prosecutors accepted he was ‘unequivocally’ suffering mental disorder when he snapped.

He has no complaint with the length of time the process took, understanding that the wheels of justice move slowly. Nor does he wish to point the finger of blame at his former colleagues.

‘There are lots of facts we still don’t know so we could be pointing the finger at the wrong person,’ says Al. ‘The last thing we want to do is be chucking blame around.

When, a few weeks later, his sentence was cut to seven years, the public gallery erupted into loud cheers, but it’s the fact the ‘with disgrace’ was dropped from his dismissal that moves this proud Marine most.

‘Yes, you’ve been convicted of shooting this dying insurgent but the rest of your career counts again. You’re not a dishonourable man.’ He stops. Breathes deeply.

‘You’ve been punished for what you’ve done but you’re not an evil person.’

Al is not too sure what he will do next. For now, he just wants to be at home with his wife and spend as much time with her as possible.

‘I just want to get settled, get used to being out and get used to my licence restrictions — just ease back into life.’